John Francis Cahlan is a native of Nevada, born in Reno in 1902. He had a long career as a newspaperman and followed an avocation in politics, serving as a regent of the University of Nevada, a legislative lobbyist, and as an instigator of the...

Edward L. Pine was born in 1914, and he is a member of pioneer Nevada mining and business families. He lived as a child in Nevada mining camps of Rawhide, Rochester, and Broken Hills, and later in Hawthorne and Reno. For a time, he was a resident...

Through interviews with 21 individuals with a wide range of firsthand experiences, this oral history project illuminates the evolution of gaming regulation in Nevada. The elimination of organized crime from the state’s casinos might have happened...

During 1994-1995, the UNOHP collaborated with the University of Nevada History Department on a project funded by the Nevada State Board of Medical Examiners. Anita Watson, Ph.D. candidate in the History Department, conducted oral history interviews...

When John Francis Cahlan first arrived in Las Vegas in 1929 he could legitimately claim that he was older than the sleepy railroad community founded in 1905. A native of Reno, he was born to Albert and Marion Cahlan in 1902, the youngest of two...

Hugh A. Shamberger was born in Idaho in 1900. He attended schools in the Payette region and graduated from Stanford University with an engineering degree. He worked at surveying and engineering jobs in California, and when Hoover Dam was in the...

No attorney has played a greater role in the rise of the casino industry and how it is regulated than has Robert D. Faiss. In this oral memoir, Faiss gives an eloquent, eyewitness account of crucial events and moments in the history of gaming...

Harold S. Gorman was born in Carlin, Nevada, in 1903. He moved with his family to Reno as a child. There, he attended local schools and trained for a profession in banking. His parents were prominent members of the community, his father being...

Erma O. Godbey was born in 1905 in Colorado, and she spent her early years in the Colorado mining camp of Silverton. After her marriage to Thomas Godbey, she lived in a number of other mining towns, arriving finally in Boulder City, Nevada. At that...

University of Nevada, Reno -- Presidents;
University of Nevada, Reno -- History

N. Edd Miller served as chancellor and then president of the University of Nevada, Reno, from 1965 to 1973, a crucial and exciting period. During his tenure, the university underwent important changes in administrative structure, launched a...

The transformation of Las Vegas from an empty desert landscape into a sprawling metropolis of 700,000 in eighty years is among the most remarkable stories in the history of the American West, but only a few of the city's citizens can claim to have...

Robbins E. Cahill’s career of service to the state of Nevada has been long and distinguished. He has spent nearly his whole life in Nevada as student, businessman, politician, worker for state and local agencies, lobbyist, and civic leader. Born in...

Woodrow Wilson was born in a sawmill town in Mississippi in 1915, the son of a mill worker. His mother owned and operated boarding houses, and the family was somewhat more prosperous than the average black family of that area and time. Following...

Joseph F. McDonald has had an unusually rich and varied life, stretching over almost seventy years of Nevada's history. A native of Colorado, he was born in 1891, and his life initially revolved around lumber and mining camps. He came to Nevada in...

Morton "Mort" Saiger was born in 1903 and raised in a Jewish ghetto in Poland. He fled the country at the close of 1920 to avoid military service, and came to the United States. Other family members had preceded him several years before, and he...

This oral history with Lubertha Johnson documents one black professional woman's service in the cause of civil rights. From the formative phase of the modern black struggle for equality in the 1940s, through the high tide of activism in the 1960s...

In Playing the Cards That Are Dealt, the reader will encounter forty years of casino gaming history as lived and observed by one of the industry’s most respected figures. L. Mead Dixon began practicing law in Reno in 1950. He quickly became an...